The Trouble of Mandated Enthusiasm

Everyone on your team needs a pep talk now and then. The most motivated person you know has times in their day or week where they need someone else to push them and encourage them help reframe their mindset. When someone does that for another, it is a beautiful and inspiring thing to see.

If someone on your team doesn’t care, is unhappy, frustrated, hurt, disenchanted, or burned out, pushing them to drum up some fake, mandated enthusiasm only drives the wedge of disconnect deeper.

Think of some of the conference calls or zoom calls you have been a part of. Take a look around the room at the next meeting or the next morning huddle that you lead or are a part of. How do you as the leader walk the line between pepping the team up and forcing the team up?

The trouble is never the conference call, morning huddle, or team meeting. The trouble of mandated enthusiasm is that by doing so you are never getting to the core issue. Your fist pumps, rah-rah’s, and let’s go’s only communicate how disconnected YOU are from your team and it gets perceived as if you don’t care.

The leaders who mandate authenticity - no matter how ugly, who set the tone that they want to hear the truth no matter how ugly; who not only ask “What can I be doing better?” but genuinely wait patiently for a response because they mean it; those are the leaders who will know at the end of the call, meeting, or huddle, what they really have and who they should be talking and listening to.

To mandate authenticity means that you are going to have to be brave, strong, and courageous. It means that you may have to absorb some difficult feedback and navigate through some tense waters. If you want your team to be enthusiastic about the goal for the day or week or month, they need to know that you are enthusiastic about them first.

Make authenticity your mandate, and I promise you that enthusiasm will follow.